Last month saw the 15th birthday of WordPress and since its release in the market, the CMS has evolved a lot and has come up with various features and functionalities. Whenever we talk about WordPress, the first thing that comes to our mind is that of a great blogging platform. But with years, this concept has slowly changed and WordPress now supports ecommerce solutions and responsive designs too. By default, WordPress comes up with posts and pages as their prime content system. But users can easily create many custom content types as needed.
Did you know that Custom Post Types could help you segment your content within WordPress?
As said above, WordPress development comes up with a handful of content types as default. Posts and pages are the most commonly used ones and they are the ones to categorise and separate content within WordPress. The content can be segmented into different areas of the WordPress admin panel and offer unique sets of data per data type. This data then can be used customized displays for the users when the website goes live. Custom post types extend the WordPress simple pages and posts and allow the users to create content types that are augmented by specific and unique templates to present the data to website visitors.
When and why should you use custom post types?
Depending on the type of content that you are willing to publish on your WordPress website, you can develop them. A new custom post type can be a great idea if you have plans to start publishing something that should be kept apart from any other posts and pages. For example, having a section separately for your books on your WordPress review website will make the content easily understandable to your audience and also distinguish the reviews from the rest of your web content. In fact, this will also help you to set certain specific parameters for each of your book and then display alongside the review.
Get to know about some popular off the shelf plugins to create CPTs
Finding it difficult to create your own custom plugins for CPTs? There is nothing to worry about as there are some very good ready to use plugins for creating custom post types. Have a look:
Easy content types : This plugin provides an extremely easy to use interface to them, meta boxes and taxonomies. It is a feature rich plugin and the dashboard explains what they are and how you can work with them. Each module is well documented with every field labeled and explained.
Custom Post Type UI : This plugin is easy to use and lets you create new post types, corresponding taxonomies and also edit the them that are already existing on your site. Another important thing that you can do with this plugin is that you can import a custom post that you have on any other site.
Toolset Types: This plugin allows you to customize the WordPress admin by adding the content types, customized fields and taxonomies. It helps you to manage them, and all these can be done via the WordPress admin panel.
Types: This is a popular free plugin that enables you to create custom post types, fields and taxonomies. This plugin stands out from the rest due to its developer-friendly and user friendly interface. If you know coding, then you can use the PHP API or else you can use the simple GUI. It also handles custom fields well, which you can add to posts, pages and also users.
Pods: The plugin is very simple when compared to any other on the list. But it offers you the functionality that you might need in most cases. The two main sections of the plugin are Post Types and Taxonomies. In order to use this plugin, you don't have to have any coding skills as everything is there via a handy interface.
